Nell Stevens: ‘I learned to concentrate in a way I thought I had lost.’

Nell Stevens was not the woman I was expecting to meet after reading her memoir, Bleaker House. This is an entertaining, perverse and singular book about travelling to Bleaker, a rocky, snowy, windswept island in the Falklands (official population: two), thanks to a Boston University fellowship offering all-expenses-paid travel to a place of her choosing to write a first novel. She chose to spend three months in the Falklands in winter 2013. She was lonely and undernourished – she had not packed realistically. She describes her minutely planned regime. She resolved to write 2,500 words a day, fuelled by a meagre diet (1,805 her calorie limit), with the expectation that a novel would materialise. The novel refused to come quietly. She wrote on. She kept a diary. She read Dickens’s Bleak House. She ate handfuls of nuts, met penguins, experienced paranoia. But all was not abortive: the experience delivered this memoir, doubling as a sketch of the Falklands and a self-portrait. Do not suppose it self–indulgent – indulgence is not Stevens’s thing.

My favourite object in the book, I tell her, is the potato. Given her by one of the islanders to boost her rations, she saved it like a trophy and eventually gave it back – old and uneaten. It almost qualifies as a symbol for her unwritten novel. I expected Bleaker House’s author to be wan, masochistic, etiolated – like a plant left too long in the dark. But 31-year-old Stevens – on the brink of publishing this book and, remarkably, with a second coming in summer 2018 – is rosy-cheeked and charming. She gleams with intelligence. I assume the second book is not a novel? “It is called Mrs Gaskell and Meand has a collage structure – about doing a PhD and falling in love with an American – it is another memoir.”

Writers divide, I suggest, between reactors (journalists, non-fiction writers, critics, certain poets) and creators (novelists, playwrights, certain poets). Does she still feel she belongs in the first category or is she, as the evidence would suggest, an eloquent member of the second? “For some reason, I so desperately hope to be in the first category. I don’t know why we think fiction is a higher calling. But if you were a child who enjoyed reading, you imagine you will write fiction. The novel seems the highest form of art I could hope to create.”

One impediment to being able to write fiction might be – something she alludes to in the memoir – her upbringing. Happy childhoods do novelists no favours. Happiness writes white or not at all. Her Oxford childhood was “quiet”. Her mother is an academic (an economist), her father a GP. She was a daydreamer who later became a troublesome teenager. “I’d rock in at 4am to find my dad sitting patiently waiting up for me.”

And might another obstacle to novel production be the critical self-consciousness brought on by too much lit crit? Stevens will not buy this. She studied English with creative writing at Warwick and assures me: “Studying creative writing makes you read differently – from the inside out, you want to know how it is done.” Her inner “straitlaced academic” and “wannabe creator” get along fine.

However, in her 20s, she tried to write like Ian McEwan which “held me back a lot”. It was Hannah Griffiths, formerly an editor at Faber, who asked: “Why are you writing about a 70-year-old man with lung cancer? Why not write about someone like yourself?”

Maybe the failure to produce a novel on the Falklands was for a humbler reason – not enough food to feed the brain? What would her GP father have said? “It is conceivable,” she laughs, “and there were so many other strictures that did not make it into the book. I was determined not to drink alcohol and to read Shakespeare every day. I got through Hamlet, Measure for Measure and A Winter’s Tale.”

There was, she adds, one positive side effect: “I learned to concentrate in a way I thought I had lost. I could read like a child there, completely absorbed.” The problem with our distractingly technological life, she goes on, is the “expectation that something is about to happen”. In the Falklands, nothing happened – testing in a different way.

To be a writer should be seen to be as complicated as becoming a concert pianist

Nell Stevens

In the book, Stevens quotes her mother asking, exasperatedly, why she puts herself in difficult situations. After completing her English degree, she studied Arabic at Harvard. “My generation were just becoming aware of the world when 9/11 happened. Politics seemed constantly drawn back to the Middle East. I studied Arabic because it seemed a way of participating in the world and I wanted to participate.” She also felt there was a cultural gap in this country – not enough Arabic spoken, insufficient understanding. She learned to speak Syrian Arabic, then worked in a refugee camp in Lebanon and lived in Syria, in 2006, when it was thought a safe haven: “My memories of Syria are so idyllic and of people who were so relaxed. I remember taking a bus to Palmyra, wandering around the ruined city by myself. Palmyra later became an Isis stronghold.”

The following summer, she worked in a Palestinian refugee camp. She knows it was hard for her parents: “You want to give your child a comfortable life but this child was determined to become uncomfortable.” She is now “much calmer – a different person to the one who went to the Falklands. I don’t feel the same compulsion to put myself in objectively dangerous situations.”

Everything changed when she sold Bleaker House. Until then, she had been “propelled by anxiety and had no back-up plan. This was a motor towards unusual exploits”. She learned a lot in Boston: “discipline on the page: refusing to be sentimental. The value of clean, spare work.” This is what her teacher, Leslie Epstein, taught “unwaveringly”. She has since had a stint of teaching creative writing in the US: “To be a writer,” she says, “should be seen to be as complicated as becoming a concert pianist.”

Nowadays, she lives in Peckham, south-east London, and works happily delivering post in a psychiatric hospital, a “sane” job. If she had another chance to choose an idyllic place in which to write, she would pick Cornwall – or the Amalfi coast. She is not sure if she will return to the Falklands. She feels “quite scared of it”. “But I was recently in touch with Phyl Rendell, the wonderful woman who owns the island, who said: ‘This is ridiculous – you have to come back in the summer!’ That tempted me. But I worry islanders won’t like the book. I told them I was writing a novel because I believed I was, then left and wrote something that was not. They don’t enjoy being represented in ways they have no control over, so it may be that they really hate it.” She is working on a new book now – a novel. Third time lucky? “That’s the plan and I’m working on it. It is the only thing I want to do.”

• Bleaker House by Nell Stevens is published by Picador (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99